A series of events this month will commemorate a larger than life New Zealand economist who 50 years ago penned one of the most widely cited economics papers written.

Bill Phillips' 1958 paper on the relationship between inflation and unemployment become the celebrated "Phillips Curve".

The man himself regarded his article as a "wet weekend's bit of work", although it led to a re-shaping of macroeconomic policy for decades.

To mark the paper's publication, a large economic symposium is being held in Wellington this month and the Reserve Bank will run an exhibition at its museum.

Dr Phillips' led a "remarkable life", Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard said.

Born in 1914 on a farm in New Zealand, he travelled as a youth through Australia, where he ran an outback movie theatre and was a crocodile hunter.

He trained as an electrician but civilian life was interrupted by World War 2, in which he was captured and held as a Japanese prisoner-of-war .

His survival features in a book Night of the New Moon, which provided the basis of the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.

Arriving in London after the war, he attended classes at the London School of Economics (LSE) and was invited to study for a post-graduate degree in economics.

"Phillips was fascinated with the interactions of sectors across the economy," Dr Bollard said.

Using his engineering knowledge, Dr Phillips built a hydraulic model of the economy called the Moniac, which will be on di splay at the Reserve Bank Museum in Wellington.

The Phillips "curve" hypothesised that when unemployment was low, wage growth was high and vice versa.

In other words, according to Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Fed, excess capacity in the economy exerts significant downward pressure on inflation.

The concept was refined further in the 1960s by renowned US economists Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps.

They concluded that in the long run, unemployment had some natural level -- the Natural Rate of Unemployment -- and that if unemployment was pushed below this level, inflation would rise, and vice versa.

While unemployment would eventually return to its natural level, they surmised inflation would remain at its new level.

In the Wall St Journal last month, Robert Leeson, a visiting economics professor at Stanford University, said Dr Phillips deserved more credit than he got.

"In 1952 Friedman asked Phillips how to model inflationary expectations and Phillips wrote for him the adaptive inflationary expectations formula that was later used to suggest that the Phillips curve had neglected inflationary expectations."

Mr Leeson said inflation was much more serious in Dr Phillip's theoretical model "and the system becomes unstable. In Friedman's model, the worst that happens is that you return to the natural rate of unemployment. Phillips was in a sense more of an opponent of inflation than Friedman."

The Journal said debate about the trade-off between unemployment and inflation was especially relevant today because US unemployment had risen sharply in the last year, and so had inflation, reflecting large increases in food and energy prices.

"Within the Federal Open Market Committee there are sharp disagreements on how much assurance they should take that the rise in unemployment will bring inflation back down.

"Some openly question the validity of either the natural rate of unemployment or the Phillips Curve."

Returning from London after the 1968 student riots, Dr Phillips returned firstly to the Australian National University in Canberra, then to University of Auckland.

He died in 1975 , aged just 61.

The symposium, which explores "policy frontiers in the AWH Phillips' tradition", takes place in Wellington, from July 9 to 11.

It is likely to be one of the largest seen in the Southern Hemisphere and has attracted some of the world's top economists.

Keynote speakers include Professor Sir Clive Granger, a 2003 Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Professor Tom Sargent, one of the leaders of the "rational expectations revolution".

The symposium is hosted by the New Zealand Association of Economists and the Australian meeting of the Econometric Society.

Dr Bollard will also deliver public lectures about Dr Phillips on July 14 at Auckland University and July 16 at the National Library in Wellington.